Difference between revisions of "Introducing Lacan"

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(The [[phantasy]] of [[fragmentation]] may be found beneath the more celebrated [[phantasy]] of [[castration]]. (He developed the thesis that ''in [[paranoia]] we can witness a sort of decomposition'' which illustrates clearly the stages in the "normal" constitution of the [[image]] and of [[reality]] as such.
 
(The [[phantasy]] of [[fragmentation]] may be found beneath the more celebrated [[phantasy]] of [[castration]]. (He developed the thesis that ''in [[paranoia]] we can witness a sort of decomposition'' which illustrates clearly the stages in the "normal" constitution of the [[image]] and of [[reality]] as such.
  
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=====The Construction of the Ego=====
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For example, the motifs of mirrored images, telepathic communication, observation and external persecution so common in [[paranoia]] may be understood as fundamental building blocks in the constitution of the [[ego]].  If the [[ego]] is constructed on an [[image]] outside ourselves, if our identity if given in an [[alienation]].... (The truth of the ego emerges precisely in [[madness]] where the world seems to dissolve and the difference between self and other is radically put in question.)
  
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In our day-to-day relationship with other people, we are unaware of these criteria, even if many works of [[art]], notably those of Dali, try to capture this idea. ([[Lacan]] was thus led to the theory that [[human]] [[knowledge]] is in its very essence [[paranoiac]].)
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It is in [[paranoia]] that we can see so clearly the components, the steps which go to make up the relation to the world which [[madness]] can remind us of.
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(Although Lacan's theory of the image at this date is often explained in terms of the influence of surrealism, it owes much more to certain currents in French psychiatry such as the work of Joseph Capgras and those psychiatric thinkers interested in problems of recognition, doubling and the image.  Lacan often returned to the notion of the mirror phase to reformulate it during his teaching.  It never stayed static.  There is no one theory of the mirror phase in Lacan's work, but several.)
  
 
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Revision as of 22:43, 15 November 2006

Family

Born on 13 April 1901, Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was the first child of Charles Marie Alfred Lacan and Émilie Philippine Marie Baudry. Alfred Lacan was the Paris sales representative of a large provincial firm. The family lived in comfortable conditions in the Boulevard du Beaumarchais before moving to the Montparnasse area where Jacques entered the prestigious Catholic school, the Collège Stanislas.

Education

An outstanding pupil, he excelled in religious studies and Latin. As a teenager, Jacques Lacan developed a passion for philosophy, adorning the walls of his bedroom with a plan of the structure of Spinoza's Ethics, a text which would always remain dear to him and which he would quote at the start of his doctoral dissertation in medicine.

The Surrealist Movement

Lacan took up the study of medicine in 1920 and specialized in psychiatry from 1926. During this period, he was active in the busy Parisian world of the writers, artists and intellectuals who made up the surrealist movement.

He frequented Adirenne Monnier's booshop on the Left Bank, along with the lies of AndrE Gide and Paul Claudel and, at the age of seventeen, met James Joyce.

A friend of André Breton and Salvador Dali, he was to become Picasso's personal physician and a contributor to several Surrealist publications from the early 1930s.

(Three years later he was present at he first public reaing of Joyce's Ulysses in the legendary bookshop, Shakespeare & Co.)

Beginnings in Psychiatry

His internship at St-Anne hospital, starting in 1926, and at the Infirmerie Spéciale des Aliénés de la Préfecture de Police, in 1928, gave Lacan a particular interest in the study of paranoia.

Later he would say that "My only real master in psychiatry was Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault."

Lacan singled out his concept of "mental automatism". This brought together many seemingly disparate phnomena of madness under the common motif of something being imposed from 'outside': the echo of thoughts or a commentary on one's actions, for example.

The form of a particular psychosis would then be determined by how one made sense of these elements which lacked an initial content. Lacan would say that this concept was the closest that contemporary French psychiatry got to a structural analysis, with its emphasis on the imposition of formal elements beyond the "conscious" control of the subject.

Paranoia

In 1932, Lacan completed his doctoral thesis on paranoia, Paranoid Psychosis and its Relation to the Personality, a study which had a great influence on many of the Surrealists.

The Case of Aimée

The thesis contains a detailed analysis of a woman, named Aimée after the heroine of one of her unpublished novels, who had attempted to stab a well-known Parisian acctress, Huguette Duflos. The case was widely reported in the press at the time, and Lacan tried gradually to piece together the logic behind her apparently irrational act. His thesis introduced a new concept into the psychiatric milieu, that of "self-punishment paranoia". Lacan argued that, in striking the actress, Aimée was in fact striking herself: Duflos represented a woman with freedom and social prestige, exactly the sort of woman that Aimée aspired to become.

In her ideas of persecution, it was this figure that she saw as the source of threats to her and her young son. The ideal image was thus both the object of her hate and of her aspiration. Lacan was especially interested here in this complex relation to images and the ideas of identity to be found in paranoia. In her subsequent arrest and confinement, she found the punishment which was a real source of the act itself. She understood, at a certain level, that she was herself the object of punishment.

Lacan's analysis of the case shows many of the features which would later become central to his work: narcissism, the image, the ideal, and how the personality could extend beyond the limits of the body and be constituted within a complex social network. The actress represented a part of Aimée herself, indicating how the identity of a human being could include elements well outside the biological boundaries of the body. In a sense, Aimée's identity was literally outside of herself.

Analysis

Around the time that Lacan completed his thesis, he began his analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, which continued until 1938. Loewenstein had been analyzed by Freud's student Hans Sachs.

Studies in Philosophy

Instead of confining himself to the standard texts in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, Lacan read widely, with a special interest in the philosophical work of Karl Jaspers, G.W.F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger. He attended the seminars on Hegel given by Alexandre Kojève together with many of the thinkers who would leave their mark on French intellectual life, Georges Bataille, Raymond Aron, Pierre Klossowski and Raymond Queneau.

Marriage

In 1934, Lacan married Marie-Louise Blondin, the sister of his friend the surgeon Sylvain Blondin. Three children were born from this marriage, Caroline in |1934, Thibaut in 1939 and Sibylle in 1940.

The Marienbad Congress

Lacan made his first intervention at the annual Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association, held at Marienbad, in 1936. He developed the thesis of the "mirror phase." The original text of this paper is lost, but the brilliant article on the family which Lacan contributed to the Encyclopédie Française in 1938, together with a later version of the paper, presents the argument clearly.

Theory of the Mirror Phase

Humans are born prematurely. Left to themselves, they would probably die. They are always born too early. They can't walk or talk at birth: they have a very partial mastery of their motor functions and, at the biological level, they are hardly complete. The infant can't pick things up or move towards or away from things. So how does the child come to master its relation to its body? How does it respond to its "prematuration"?

... and Mimicry

Lacan's answer is in the theory of the mirror phase. He draws our attention, in later texts, to an enthological curiosity, known as "mimicry." Certain beasts have the habit of assuming the insignia and coloring of their surroundings. Hence a stick insect may choose to look like a stick. The obvious explanation for this phenomenon is that it protects the animal against predators. But what many investigators found was that those animals which assumed an image or disguise were just as likely to be eaten as those which didn't.

The US government had commissioned a survey in the early 1930s involving the rather macabre task of examining the stomaches of some 60,000 Neartic birds to confirm this diagnosis by counting the insects which had been swallowed. The ones which had disguised themselves were no less frequent than their most honest companions. So if evolutionary biology cannot provide an answer to the question of mimetism with the idea of protection from predators, how can it be explained?

Roger Caillois, a French thinker fascinated with the theme of masks, games and the relation of the human to the animal kingdom, argued that there was a sort of natural law whereby organisms become captured in their environment. They will thus take on the coloring, for example, of the space around them.

Captured in an Image

Lacan developed this thesis in his work on the mirror phase, combining it with observations from child psychology and social theory and argued for a similar form of imaginary capture for the organism in an external image. (The child identifies with an image outside himself, be it an actual mirror image or simlply the image of another child. The apparent completeness of this image gives the child a new mastery over the body.)

In the 1938 encyclopedia article, this idea is used to give a brilliant explanation of the inexplicable swings in a child's behavior from the tyrannical or seductive attitude to its opposite. Rather than linking this to a conflict between two individuals, the child and the spectator in this instance, Lacan argues that it derives from a conflict internal to each of them, resulting from an identification with the other party. This is an organizing principle of development rather than a single moment in childhood. (If I have identified with an image outside myself, I can do things I couldn't do before.)

The Imaginary

Mastery of one's motor functions and an entry into the human world of space and movement is thus at the prince of a fundamental alienation. Lacan calls the register in which this identification takes place "the imaginary", emphasizing the importance of the visual field and the specular relation which underlies the child's captivation in the image.

Ego and alienation

Lacan shows how this alienation in the image corresponds with the [[ego]: the ego is constituted by an alienating identification, based on an initial lack of completeness in the body and nervous system.

Lacan's thesis provided a response to the question posed by Freud in his famous 1914 paper on Narcissism. If the ego is the seat of narcissism and if narcissism does not exist from the start of life, what must happen for narcissism to emerge? Some "new psychical action" must take place to constitute the ego, but Freud didn't say what it was. With the mirror phase, Lacan had found an answer.

Negative Hallucination
The Falsifying Ego

In other words, rationalizations of the hypnotized persons' actions wer eproduced which had the function of glossing over the true state of affairs. Whereas other commentators had drawn attention to this falsifying character of the ego in the isolated context of negative hallucination, Freud and Lacan saw it as the basic characteristic of the ego at all times.

As with the ego of the mirror phase, its task is to maintain a false appearance of coherence and completeness. Thus analysis must be mistrustful and subversive of material which stems from the ego domain.) Any theory of psychoanalysis which involved the idea of the analyst making an alliance or pact with the patient's ego was thus fundamentally ill-starred. It could only result in a mutual deception.

In this early part of Lacan's work, the human subject oscillates between two poles: the image, which is alienating, and the real body, which is in pieces. In his work of the 1930s and early 1940s, Lacan often attempts to show the presence of these images of the fragmented body beneath the classic psychoanalytic complexes.

(The phantasy of fragmentation may be found beneath the more celebrated phantasy of castration. (He developed the thesis that in paranoia we can witness a sort of decomposition which illustrates clearly the stages in the "normal" constitution of the image and of reality as such.

The Construction of the Ego

For example, the motifs of mirrored images, telepathic communication, observation and external persecution so common in paranoia may be understood as fundamental building blocks in the constitution of the ego. If the ego is constructed on an image outside ourselves, if our identity if given in an alienation.... (The truth of the ego emerges precisely in madness where the world seems to dissolve and the difference between self and other is radically put in question.)

In our day-to-day relationship with other people, we are unaware of these criteria, even if many works of art, notably those of Dali, try to capture this idea. (Lacan was thus led to the theory that human knowledge is in its very essence paranoiac.)

It is in paranoia that we can see so clearly the components, the steps which go to make up the relation to the world which madness can remind us of.

(Although Lacan's theory of the image at this date is often explained in terms of the influence of surrealism, it owes much more to certain currents in French psychiatry such as the work of Joseph Capgras and those psychiatric thinkers interested in problems of recognition, doubling and the image. Lacan often returned to the notion of the mirror phase to reformulate it during his teaching. It never stayed static. There is no one theory of the mirror phase in Lacan's work, but several.)

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